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Delicious launches revamped website

Online bookmarking service Delicious has relaunched with an improved version of its site, with improvements including an enhanced search facility.

One change is that it has dropped the dots and moved to delicious.com from del.icio.us/, which makes it much easier to type, as well as avoiding misspellings from people looking for the site on Google.

Speed

Delicious claims to have improved the speed by moving to a new infrastructure, and this certainly seems to be the case so far. The bookmarking site was slowing under the weight of its 5m users previously, but now pages are loading instantly.

Navigation

The navigation has been reorganised, with a much simpler menu than on the previous version of the site:

Community features

Delicious aims to make the site more social by encouraging users to put more detail in their profiles, as well as making it easier to search through other users' bookmarks.

One potentially useful feature that is missing though is some kind of system for recommendations. As well as recommending other articles based on the ones you have already bookmarked, it could recommend other users with similar interests.

Search

Users of Delicious now have more search options available to them. They can search bookmarks from other users as well as their own, and be more specific in the search parameters.

For example, I can select blogging from my tags and search all posts tagged in this way with another keyword:

This is excellent, and allows you to drill into the results, filter out irrelevant posts and find what you want more easily.

Reaction

Delicious has started a support forum for users to give their opinions on the new version of the site.

Predictably, as with any service that users have become accustomed to, a number of people have said they preferred the old version of the site.

Others have criticised, with some justification, the fact that many of the links are in smaller, lighter text which makes them harder to spot. Many have also complained that the new site is too cluttered.

Conclusion

The redesign of Delicious has been a long time coming, since it was initially announced nearly a year ago.

Still, the revamped version is an improvement, with better search tools and a more usable interface that should make it easier for first time visitors to see how the site works.

There are still a couple of other things we'd like to see, such as adding recommendations, and making it easier to organise your own bookmarks.

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